How Duplicate Content Affects SEO & Google Rankings

Duplicate content issues affect search engine rankings. It is vital to know the relation between duplicate content and SEO to ensure website visibility.

SEO Plagiarism Checkers Help Rank Your Content Higher

Content is created and posted online at a rate that is pretty hard to even calculate. Websites are updated with new articles. Social pages feature new uploads daily. In short, the quantity of content present on the internet is overwhelming. 

It Is The Job Of The Search Engines To Show Relevant Results To The Users

The task of search engines is to show users relevant results from the gamut of the content present or blog posts on the internet. When a person enters specific search terms on a search engine like Google, the search engine searches the internet for results that feature the search terms of the user. 

Search engines often omit similar results from the results page. The results that are omitted often have one or more kinds of duplicate content. 

Brief delineation of similar content 

It is vital to understand the meaning of duplicate content. As per the term ‘duplicate,’ the web pages that are similar to other web pages present on the internet are regarded as duplicate web pages. Search engines regard highly similar pages as a duplicate piece of content. 

The search engine cannot feature all the similar pages in response to a search query. Hence, it selects the most relevant result and shows it to the user. The rest of the similar pages are not featured. 

Duplicate content is not always a product of malicious content stealing. Internal duplication also causes similar content that confuses search engines. Website owners can witness low traffic or low ranking of the main website due to duplicate web pages that mimic the first website. 

The influence of duplicate content on website ranking

As a website developer, it is essential to steer clear from duplicate content issues. Website owners also need to check their websites by tracking their performance regularly. The presence of duplicate content usually affects website performance, and by scanning website popularity on the internet, it becomes easier to detect duplicate content. 

Google search console is useful in acquiring a detailed report about the position and performance of the website. Google duplicate content checker helps in finding similar content problems. The effect of similar content on the ranking of the website primarily occurs in two ways:

 

• No indexing by search engines:

 

Search engines come across many pages while looking for relevant results. The presence of the same content on multiple pages creates a problem for the search engine. Search engines don’t show the same pages to users, and so websites that feature similar content are not indexed by Google in the long run. Not indexed pages never appear to users making the website practically invisible on the internet. 

 

• Less frequent site crawling:

 

Indexed sites are crawled by search engines to ensure that users get relevant content. Duplicate pages waste search engines crawl action as the same content is crawled multiple times. Search engines no longer crawl the websites that display the same content or don’t upload unique content periodically. 

It again creates the problem of website visibility on the results page as search engines regard the site as irrelevant.

Effect of duplicate content on SEO 

Different ways lead to the formation of duplicate content that affects website optimization. The most common ways in which replicated content can creep in are discussed below:

 

• Internal replication of pages:

 

Within a website, one or more pages can get duplicated, and that leads to duplicate content. Often this occurs accidentally, and removing the duplicate pages is the best option to solve the problem. Optimization of web pages makes it search engine friendly, and so it is vital to upgrade sites as per the best SEO practices to avoid unnecessary replication of content. 

 

• Versions of a website:

 

Multiple functional website versions create similar content. Secure homepage and non-secure homepage form duplicate content. Similarly, versions with or without www, a website with HTTP or HTTPs create more than one form of the same page. 

Backlinks Are Helpful In Original Content Creation

Language orientation also changes the website URL enough to regard it as a different page, but the presence of the same content turns it into a duplicate page. 

All these technical problems are easy to solve with 301 redirects and selecting the preferred version in the Google search console for ranking purposes.

 

• Allowing third parties to use content:

 

Sharing content is an essential aspect of acquiring exposure in the online field. But this form of syndicated content also falls under the category of similar content. Ensuring that all forms of third party sharing mandatorily include attribution and backlink to the original work solves the issue of losing organic traffic of the main website.

Sharing Content Often Leads To Stealing Of Content

 

• Plagiarized content:

 

Plagiarism is an obvious problem on the internet, and there are numerous searches conducted on the topic of how to detect plagiarism. Stealing the work of another person is quite common. Many individuals cannot produce original content for their sites. 

They often resort to the unethical method of stealing content for acquiring links. Google SEO plagiarism mainly highlights scraped content. Scraping content can hurt the reputation of the original author, and so it becomes vital to report copyright infringement issues. 

Search engines can remove the website that relies heavily on scraped content from the indexed list. The content on site is scanned with content checker plagiarism software like an SEO plagiarism checker to detect plagiarism.

 

• Descriptions on e-commerce sites:

 

Products are available on e-commerce sites for sale. The description given for a product in category pages is often copied and used in other sites. It is not plagiarism, but new e-commerce sites might find it challenging to feature their products on the search list as the same descriptions often lead the search engines to not feature the result on the results page. 

Product Descriptions Tend To Have Duplicate Content

New sites have to find unique ways to present their products instead of using the well-known descriptions present on established e-commerce sites to fix this issue.

The presence of duplicate content doesn’t directly attract penalties from search engines. However, the website that has a sufficient quantity of duplicate content suffers in the long run as it might get removed from the search result page due to excessive similarity that renders it less relevant. 

Conclusion: 

Similar content affects website rankings to a great extent. It is sensible to monitor website performance regularly and update the site with fresh content or original articles or blogs. So that search engines index always keeps the website of the organization with unique content at the topmost rank. 

To create unique content can definitely go for the online plagiarism checkers, along with the SEO tools that can help the content to gain a high search engine rank as well.